Chapter 8: The Missing

On the far side of Mirrormere, he found the arrow half-buried, its fletching of crebain feathers mistaken for a peculiar growth of sedges until he drew closer. The shaft, grease-blacked, crooked too far to the left. The work of a sloppy archer or one who cared not whether the arrow struck its mark clean.

A breeze tickled past his ear from the west, bringing with it a chill, sour whiff like wool left outside in the rain. Elrohir put out his hand to tug the arrow free, but at the sight of the boots, his fingers fell away.

They were riding boots, fitted to the knee, tooled with a tracery of celandine—unmistakably Eldarin design—though coarsened by grit and weather.

The arrow had not flown awry after all. It had caught the messenger below the ribs, enough to unseat him, not to kill him. That had come later.

He lay half-submerged in the sedges with his cloak of office wrapped like a dirty bandage about his head and shoulders. The Lady's arts had not spared him the enemy's eye or aim, but they shielded him now when concealment served no further purpose.

What his murderers had done to him amid the reeds did not bear closer examination.

Elrohir forced himself forward, cracking the rime about the pool's edges. The water was no more than ankle-deep along the bank. Sliding in icy mud, he heaved the body onto its side—the dead were always so heavy—and peeled the sodden wool away. The effort left him sweating and winded, but he would not do the fellow the disservice of hauling him up by what remained of his hair.

He stared at the sedges until they blurred out of focus then lowered his eyes to the dead face. It was waxy and swollen in the way of the drowned, abraded from the mere's bottom. One eye was half-open, the other occluded with murk. Even so, Elrohir recognized him: the ghostly rider on the high road. Lórien's messenger. Rocheryn.

"I'm sorry this befell you," he murmured.

A poor threnody, but all he could offer. What honor was there dying on a field like this? With your face in mud, the cloak you once wore with pride now your winding sheet? No one's friend or lover or brother should die like that without satisfaction or reason. Too often had he stood over such sights in his ranging. Some of them those he had known or loved. But those accompanied by the indemmar always gnawed at him long after. As if fate had handed him a chance to avert catastrophe, and he had refused even though he'd been unaware of a choice.

He shivered.

Ages had passed since he'd left Aragorn at the other end of the mere. Had his mind not been so long shut, he would have sent along an indemma of his own to hasten Aragorn's step. As it was, he could only wait.

Boots slopping and squelching, he climbed the beaten track descending from the Stair, and amid a tumbled fall of stones above it, he discovered the enemy's ambush. Wind and weather had scrubbed most of the signs away, but he found a set of bootprints too angular for a Man, too heavy for an Elf where someone had crouched two or three days ago. A rider hurrying past would read nothing of his danger until the arrow struck.

A loud, wet sneeze jolted his attention up. The noise had come from below him, but a hedge of close-growing gorse along the ridge obscured his view.

"Hoi! Shut your noise, will you? I can't hear myself think between all your snuffling and sniffing."

"Grass itchin' my nose."

"I'll give you an itch you won't soon forget if you don't shut it. Only reason we let you along in the first place is your mouth's even bigger than your ears. No crowing about this to the rest. Hear me?"

At the voices, speaking an unlovely form of the Common Tongue, Elrohir dropped low and hiked his hood over his face. The high grass rose on all sides like a flimsy palisade.

Orcs—three of them—loped out of the brush an arrow's flight from him, tacking towards Mirrormere from the direction of the Moria Gate. Only the foremost—long and heavy of limb—was distinguishable by his raiment: sable charged with the defiled moon. The other two hung at his heels, squinting against the low sun and keeping in their companion's broad shadow. Small and wiry, they were mountain-folk of one sort or another. And for all their light arms, if the wind turned in their favor, their noses would prove keener than any blade.

Elrohir kept low.

"Cursed sun's getting low at last." One of the orcs scratched a piebald ear so large and floppy it folded over at the tip and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "My skin doesn't like it. I break all out in prickles."

"You'll bear it. And on the double too, if I say so," growled the Guldur orc as they paused on the road below Elrohir's blind. "The Nazgûl want the inroads Above and Below in hand before spring, and those elvish brigands up there dealt with sooner than that. Though no amount of pay or praise is worth managing you sloppy lot—oi, this isn't a holiday."

His followers were falling out, hunkering in the slope's shade.

"Oh, give it a rest, Raggy," said the other orc, the greenish hue of a cave-dweller with lamp-like eyes and wide nostrils. A tracker, by the look of him. "You've been banging at us all day."

"That's 'Captain Raguk' to you. Mind that familiar tongue, snaga, or my dagger here will mind it for you."

The tracker spread his hands. The left one had only three fingers, giving it the look of a hawk's talon. The entire outer bone of the hand had been shorn away. A clean cut by a keen blade.

He passed his sniffling comrade a flask of cracked leather. "It's a sad day when a fellow can't talk with his old shield mate without rank getting between them isn't it. You have a sit down here, Lob, my duck, and get this down your throat. Clear out your nose like anything."

Lob spluttered and coughed out his thanks, eyes streaming now as much as his nose.

The tracker settled down beside him, reclining back on his elbows. "Come along, Captain, my dear. No need to be a brave fellow, standing out there like that. The lads will keep."

"Dispatches are late. I don't like it." Raguk folded his arms even as he eased into the glen's shadow. "Gorhúr's too good a soldier for that."

"Weather's foul up there. You can smell it."

"Maybe they got him," Lob said, shuddering.

"It'd take more than a pack of elvish rebels to get the ole Mangler," Raguk scoffed. "Trust me, he won't be caught wrong-footed if there's trouble."

"One of those rebels got past you," Lob muttered around the mouth of the flask.

"What did you say to me, you little twat? Nothing moves in the dale I don't know about. Nothing. And, besides, he didn't get far."

The tracker scratched his back thoughtfully against a stone. "Where there's one, there's more. Like fleas, that lot."

"Speaking from experience are you?"

"I still say I caught two scents at the old Stone. And that shadow—"

"Ah, shadow! Sun-blind, you are! You saw grass moving, that's what you saw."

"Maybe." More conciliatory than assenting, he cocked his head to one side. "Something funny going on though and no mistake. It's Her: the White Bitch in the Wood wants her fingers in all our pies. Sends her little birds to flit in under our roof."

Lob, who had been tugging the grass out in clumps, lifted his nose to the wind and sniffed like one savoring a heady wine. "I'm hungry. Time for rations?"

The tracker rose, stretched wiry limbs. "What say you, Captain Raguk? You can have the finer bits, head and tail will do us."

Lob was already thrashing among the reeds at the mere's edge. He pawed at Rocheryn's boots, a greedy light in his eyes. With strength surprising in one so lean, he heaved the body out of the water and up the bank.

Strategy as much as skill can carry a victory or break it, Haldir intoned in Elrohir's ear. Outnumbered three to one the odds did not favor him, and if the rest of a raiding party were nearby, his chances thinned still more. When Lob's jaws began to crack around small bones, he gripped the haft of his knife until the knuckles blenched, but he held himself there.

Raguk paced up and down below him, tapping his strung bow against his thigh. If the Orc caught his scent…

From the direction of Dúrin's Stone came a hail. Another gangling shape trotted out of the gloaming around the south side of the mere. "Captain. You need to come. The lads found a Man hanging round about the Gate."

"What do I care about some vagrant? We haven't time for sport. Kill him and be done with it."

"Not that sort of Man—he's tall, dark-haired. Looks like one of those tarks, maybe even the same one we had that trouble with across the river."

Elrohir's heart dropped. Aragorn.

"And he stole a march on you. Didn't I leave anybody awake?"

"We were awake all right, Captain, but he came on us all of a sudden. He was wearing one of those elvish cloaks. Nasty things. He claims he's come from the elf-country between the rivers. Sounds like they turned him out when they had no more use for him. No surprise there. Regular elvish loyalty, that. He says one ill turn deserves another, and he'd be willing to offer something of advantage to the fellow who would appreciate it. Norgush was leery enough, wanted to kill him out of hand. We were wondering what's to be done."

"Keep hold of him." A feral grin split Raguk's features as he strode back towards the mere, aiming a kick at Lob in passing. "Up on your hunkers. You'll have your rations once we get our find back to the Gate. Go on. Leave it."

Letting Rocheryn's reduced hand fall from his jaws, Lob armed away slaver and, with the deepest of dejected airs, trudged after his officer.

The tracker did not. He was casting up and down the bank, bending to the mud where Rocheryn's body had lain.

"Oi, Zuraz, stir your stumps, or I'll stir them for you."

"Somebody's been here."

"What are you on about?"

"Light boots. Elves."

"And what would you call that then?"

"Raggy, if brains were a sack of grain, you wouldn't fall over. It's a fresh trail. Not an hour old. An Elf's been here—or still might be. If Merlin's tark is round about, Himself won't be far off. You thought I was wrong in the Narrows, too, and look how that went pear-shaped."

"Now who's banging on. Don't talk to me about the Narrows."

Zuraz had found Elrohir's tracks in the mud. The high grass cushioned his footfalls enough, but the prints he'd left around and about Rocheryn's body would lead them right up the path to his blind.

As if summoned by thought, Zuraz's lamplike eyes stared right upslope into Elrohir's own. Crimson sparks flew to the centers of each slitted pupil.

Elrohir's boot dagger took Raguk in the shoulder, forcing him to drop his bow with a howl.

Drawing his sword, Elrohir hurled himself downslope.

Raguk seized Lob and thrust him into the path of Elrohir's cleaving blade. It speared him through the chest, slaying him instantly, but the blade tangled in the orc's ribs and nearly dragged the hilt out of his hands.

The scout who had brought news of Aragorn fled down the bank with a yell, but the other two did not run.

Raguk plucked Elrohir's dagger from his shoulder with a snarl and drew an ugly knife from his belt despite the blood seeping through his jerkin. "Zuraz. What are you sitting there for?"

Zuraz was still crouched by the bank, his chin resting in one hand, as if he were watching some sport that only mildly interested him. "That's beyond this sorry lot's pay grade, Captain."

"Damn you. Stop messing about and help me." He spat in the grass at Elrohir's feet. "When my lads get their hands on you, Elf, you'll wish you were your comrade there."

Elrohir planted a boot on the slain Orc's chest and wrenched his blade free.

A shaft buzzed between them and thumped into the dirt at Raguk's feet. White feathers fletched the shaft.

Zuraz sprang up. "Golug-hai. Told you didn't I? Fleas."

They bolted, stooping low and angling for cover.

In hot pursuit, a band of grey-cloaked riders galloped up, parting nimbly around and about Elrohir as if he were a boulder in the midst of a silver river. The foremost rider's white cloak gleamed in the dusk.

Calen fell out of formation and reined in beside him. "Are you all right?"

"Give me your horse. Now!"

The scout's boots barely kicked out of the stirrups before Elrohir was in the saddle. The gelding, unsettled by unfamiliar hands, danced before Elrohir got hold of him and spurred on after the pack.

But the Orcs, swift at need and on their own ground, slipped their pursuers in the shadows of the gate where the terrain grew rocky and steep. As the company wheeled back towards Mirrormere, Angren's destrier intercepted Elrohir's charge.

The gelding swerved aside, tail switching. Elrohir hauled him round in a circle until he steadied then aimed him back at the gate. "Let me pass."

Less than a league distant, the Dwarf-road bounded up a series of massive stone steps to the threshold. The broken mouth of the East Gate yawned into darkness. No Raguk and Zuraz had vanished, but it did not feel unoccupied.

Angren's lips moved. Something about 'archers' and 'risk to the horses.' A low thrum had filled Elrohir's ears, rendering all else dull noise. Of Aragorn or his captors, there was no sign.

"I should never have left him alone," he murmured.

A chill wind down from the heights nodded the tips of the gorse bushes lining the old Dwarf-road. A twist of grey billowed and snapped against the branches.

Aragorn's cloak. The crooked seam in the left shoulder had been torn open, its edges flapping like flayed skin.

Dread squeezed Elrohir's heart as he maneuvered around Angren and plucked it free. There were no other rents or tears in it. No blood. In one of the pockets was a square of folded parchment. The sort any officer might keep in his quarters. It was sealed with a waxen thumbprint in the way of a ranger with neither time nor proper seal at his disposal. What might have passed for an H-rune was scrawled on its face in ash.

Something whined and skipped past his horse's hooves.

At a brisk whistle from Angren, Calen's horse trotted after his fellows, carrying Elrohir with him. He held the cloak on his lap, the unopened missive burning like a brand in his fingers. By the time they reached Mirrormere once more, he knew what he had to do. He tucked the parchment into his belt pouch and snugged the strap down tight.

"Sir! We've found Rocheryn." One of the Galadhil, hood drawn low, climbed up the bank towards them. The toneless inflection in her voice betrayed their comrade's fate without need for further detail.

"Make a litter then. We will bear him back to Lórien." The stiffness in Angren's shoulders settled deeper. "You will have to ride pillion, my lord."

"I'm not going with you." Elrohir dismounted and fetched up his dagger where Raguk had dropped it. He wiped it clean and sheathed it with a force that made the locket ring.

"My orders were very clear, my lord. I am to fetch you back and any others who were with you."

"I thought the Lord and Lady mere stewards, that they 'held no sway over the wardens' justice.'"

"Over family they do," Angren snapped.

A few of the scouts standing about the mere glanced their way. By the braids, half were yet unblooded, their arms more accustomed to poppets and wasters than weapons. Though most managed to carry themselves strong, wet cheeks were well in evidence, of anger as much as anguish.

Gripping Elrohir by the arm, Angren half-escorted, half-dragged him out of earshot. "By nightfall, the dale will be foul with the enemy. We cannot be anywhere near here. I will not risk the lives of all for the sake of one."

Though Angren's clutch was tight almost to pain, Elrohir did not pull away. Not many would have dared the openness of the dale with a passel of novices in hand for the sake of a lost messenger and a pair of waywards. And unlike Elladan, who could usually be counted on to assent in the face of Elrohir's obstinacy, Angren had the strength of numbers to compel obedience, if he wished. But returning to Lórien would mean only delay.

"One of your own is dead. Murdered by those who had no wish for him to divulge what he knew. There is more afoot here than either you or I guessed, and one family already will bear a burden of sorrow that cannot be undone. I did not ask for this, nor do I insist to make your life difficult, silgol. The Dúnadan is my brother, my father's son in love, if not in blood. Do you know what it is to have to tell a father he has lost his child? A betrothed, her beloved? I have. More times than I wish to remember."

"That is a childish, bullying thing to say. I was a casualty officer, my lord. Don't tell me of bearing ill news. It is always harder for the family than for you."

"Then do not ask me to bear such news home to my own family. Not before I have done the utmost to bring him home safe."

As if annoyed at his own loss of composure, Angren released him and smoothed back a forelock that had fallen across his eyes. "You are Haldir's pupil, truly. He considers himself above our Law as well—such singleminded purpose bodes ill for those who follow such men."

"I do not ask to lead men. Only to be free to go my way."

"And what will you do with that freedom, may I ask?"

The sun was sinking in flame behind the shoulder of the mountains. The glen was all in shadow now save a lacy ribbon of brightness spilling down the mountain's face in a series of falls. Steep and treacherous was the path that rose alongside the Dimrill Stair, and daring it in the dark was a madman's chance. Not his first. There was a road for him to take, one Aragorn had meant to steer him towards all along.

A desperate man will do what he must. Even if that meant humbling himself before the only one he wished to ask no boon of.

"I will make for the Eyrie. It is closest," he answered. "Do you have a rope you might lend me?"

Language Notes

sable charged with the defiled moon — the heraldry of Minas Morgul
(of which, I'm presuming, Dol Guldur is the fief, so they would share the blazon).

golug-hai (Black Speech) - Elves
(I doubt Orcs differentiated between Elf kindreds, so they're all "golug-hai" even if that term was initially applied to the Noldor).
Source: Unfinished Tales

Other References

Elves and Horses
Although Elves have great affinity with animals and can ride them with little gear (as Legolas does in the books), I imagine having some tack would be useful going into battle, charging the enemy and all. So that's why Elrohir has stirrups and reins. To the horse riders out there, if I got anything wrong, please do let me know.

Author's Notes

I had an indecently gleeful time writing the Orcs in this chapter, but trying to capture the casual, slangy, playful, but evil aspect they have in the books is always a tough balancing act for me. Would love to hear your thoughts on that or any other part that grabbed your attention.